Well, my Vezax hopes were dashed by the cockblock that is Mimiron.

Thorim, as expected, didn’t take us more than 5-6 tries, and all of these tries were spent learning add-control in the arena. It seems to be the absolute hardest part of the fight. The strat that worked for us was:

*Prot paladin, feral druid, destro warlock, rogue, resto shaman, resto druid in the arena.
*Prot warrior, mage, arms warrior, holy priest downstairs. Tunnel group does their thing, they had absolutely no problems.
*Fast hitting melee classes such as rogues and ferals will be penalised in the tunnel due to an aura, so we chose to not send ours down. That, and we needed the feral, yours truly, up in the arena helping with tanking.
*Rogues also are a big help upstairs because they can dismantle the Champion to prevent the arena team from taking Whirlwinds. This is important as you’re all clumped up, clothies and all. If you lose even one person, things are probably going to get out of hand.
*We could have chosen to keep the arms warrior up as well, since the aura of the boss in the tunnels penalises melee classes pretty harshly, but we decided we’d rather have Shadowfury upstairs to help with add control.
*Everyone upstairs stands in the brown circle in the middle of the room. There will be little to no lightning damage like this, plus adds are tons easier to pick up.
*Prot paladin consecrates and does his AoE thing. I beared up, helped pick up loose adds, and generally swiped the hell out of everything.
*Hang on like this for 3 minutes and you’re set.

After Thorim lands, there is absolutely nothing to the fight – tank, spank, don’t clump up, enjoy the loot. We never once wiped on this phase. Just don’t lose a tank, since unless you can CR them you will wipe (we did lose ours, but I beared up and took over since I was in tanking gear from P1.)

Our tunnel group had to deliberately wait to not trigger the hard mode, so I have all the faith that we can do it once we clear Ulduar.

Mimiron, though, is another story. We put in some really good tries, and towards the end we were consistently getting to P4.

We opted for getting P1 over with as soon as humanly possible, in order to not run out of cooldowns to use for Plasma Blast. Our MT has the Shield Wall glyph and he swears by it, so even if he uses it in P1, he knows he will have it available for the next phases. So we Guardian Spirit/LS the first one (our priest also has GS glyphed, so if all goes well he will have it available for a third Plasma Blast), SW the second, and pop Heroism/DPS cooldowns right off the bat to ensure a third one does not happen. If it does happen, we’ll have GS again, but we never had it happening.

Sometimes he will wait for a long time to cast the first Plasma Blast (I am not too sure, but it seems that sometimes he can cast Shock Blast instead of the first Plasma Blast). That means if you are lucky and have sufficiently high DPS, you can get through P1 with just one Plasma Blast.

We had our ret paladin swap to his elemental shaman for Mimiron, and in P1, he would help heal Napalm Shell’ed people if someone had it during/close to Plasma Blast. It is a pretty tough amount of damage for someone to be taking, but you absolutely cannot afford to not have all three healers on the tank during Plasma Blast.

Preferably, your DPS would also pop survival cooldowns if afflicted by Napalm Shell during or close to PB. Mages can Fire Ward/block through it, druids can Barkskin, rogues can Cloak it off, whatever. Make people use cooldowns liberally, because in our opinion, P1 was the toughest of the first three. Fire resistance aura/totem also helps ease the Shell damage.

If you survived P1, P2 will probably feel significantly easier. There is not much to say, other than the fact that it’s again a healing game. Use fire resistance aura/totem to ease Heat Wave damage, pop any defensive cooldowns you haven’t popped to make life simpler for your healers, and nuke him down.

You might get lucky and never get Spinning Up/P3Wx2 Laser Barrage. If it happens more than once, you’re probably taking too long. At any rate, all it takes is for people to be aware, it’s really a negligible ability compared to others he has.

Watch out for Rocket Strike damage. There is no excuse for dying to it.

P3. Ideally you’d use a PvP specced warlock for tanking it (we did). Ideally your warlock is also not bad like ours and can keep aggro, so that your squishy mage and ele shaman do not meet an untimely demise (yes, I’m bitter).

I tanked Junk Bots in cat gear/spec in this phase to make our MT’s life easier. Drag them to melee and get them cleaved (<3 our arms warrior). Melee need to be focusing Assault Bots pretty hard, so that they will have as much DPS uptime as possible on the ACU + extra time in between to lose the Junk Bots. We assigned our arms warrior to core looter at this point. As soon as it comes down, let everyone stop whatever they’re doing, pop cooldowns, and nuke it down. As with other phases, the shorter it lasts, the better. You don’t really have the option of chilling.

Everyone needs to be dodging Bomb Bots hardcore. If you see one coming towards you, stop whatever you are doing and LEG IT IMMEDIATELY. They are pretty fast little buggers too, so run NOW NOW NOW. The explosion can easily one-shot lower HP classes – StratFu says they explode for 5k damage on normal, but trust me, from firsthand experience, it’s a LOT more than that. And needless to say, even losing one person can spell a wipe. We never killed the Bomb Bots, since they can be dodged and it’s a lot more important to just get ACU on the ground.

In between P3 and P4, you absolutely have to lose any leftover Assault/Junk Bots as soon as humanly possible. The start of P4 is pretty chaotic, no sense making it any worse.

P4 – we usually died at this point. There are a million things that can go wrong. Melee dying to mines, MT meeting an untimely demise, warlock tank losing aggro to mage who promptly gets owned, loose adds killing someone.

In all honesty, we’ll probably get him on Tuesday. We didn’t put in that many tries, yet we were pretty successful and progressed rapidly from wiping to Plasma Blast to getting to P4 consistently.

Purchased Lumi’s dual spec. Specced cat. Got glyphs. Trudged off to a target dummy to try it out.

Now, her gear is nothing special, and she’s not gemmed optimally. In the exact same gear before 3.1, and a cat spec, she used to average 2k dps on a target dummy.

In the same gear right now on live, she’s doing between 3 and 3.1k sustained. Self-buffed.

Needless to say, happy druid? Is happy.

I’m not at all pleased about Savage Defense, though. I feel a lot more squishy, having lost 4k armor and 3k HP overnight, and I really don’t think Savage Defense is making up for that. Maybe less of a nerf to HotW and SotF, or a better idea to have a damage shield was in order?